Esboo Museum of Modern Art, Finland
June 11th – September 16th 2012

Which way is the Nordic design identity heading? After half a century of international success, designers are now questioning and confronting traditions.

The exhibition features five leading designers and design groups active in fields including fashion, furniture, lighting and glass art. The exhibited artists are Steinunn Sigurðardóttir from Iceland, Harri Koskinen from Finland, Henrik Vibskov from Denmark, and the design groups Norway Says from Norway and Front from Sweden.

They are the latest recipients of the prestigious annual Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize for design, which is funded by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations. The prize, awarded by the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, is the world’s biggest design distinction of its kind. The prize sum of one million Swedish kronas is awarded each year to a designer or artisan from the Nordic countries.

These five designers and design groups are good ambassadors for contemporary Nordic design, which is currently reimagining itself with a new identity, partly in direct opposition to the, until recently, prevailing trends of functionalism and simplicity. They demonstrate many different links to the spirit of the turn of the last century. Their works includes more historical references than those of most Nordic designers of the late twentieth century.

Norway Says
This is a Norwegian design group that could be credited with putting Norway on the international design map towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The group is a real embodiment of the renaissance experienced by Scandinavian design in the 1990s – renaissance in the sense of a renewed dominant focus on aesthetics and sparseness. This stands in contrast to the spirit of the 1960s and 70s, where steps were taken away from the unique and the elitist in the design industry in favour of creating items of “general good taste” that took design to the masses. The mid-to-late century was also a politically and socially aware period in form and design. The minimalism of the 1990s, on the other hand, fulfilled demands to recapture the Scandinavian aesthetic. The Norway Says magazine holder is a very good example of that time. Made out of light wood pressed into a stylised and simple form, it retains a high degree of functionalism. When the three members of Norway Says – Torbjørn Anderssen, Andreas Engesvik and Espen Voll – received the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize from the Crown Princess of Sweden, in front of an enlarged image of a romantic Norwegian fjeld landscape in glittering sunshine, design seemed to be light years away from politics and the ideology of “beautiful everyday items”.

The trends were blond wood, minimalism and sparseness, even more so than in the work of their precursors from earlier years. To some extent, it was a vintage period that refined modernism and functionalist architecture. In most Nordic metropolises, the trend resulted in new harbour-side districts built with a lot of glass and balconies in an updated functionalist style. The 1990s will probably be filed under ‘minimalism’ as regards the Nordic countries.

Norway Says is a national phenomenon (note the choice of name, with its clear patriotic link) with, I feel, one foot solidly in 1990s minimalism. Always pioneering, the group took steps in the early 2000s towards the local and popular inspiration found in folk tales and myths – into a new kind of national romanticism.

Norway Says draws inspiration from the Nordic region as a whole, and a perfect example of this is their pendant lamp in matte metal, which imitates the shape of the hairstyle of the Finnish fictional figure Little My. Nordic traditions can also be seen in their turned wood and choice of light-coloured wood species. Despite their apparent functionalism and modernism, they have been among the first to adopt a more romantic approach to history and functionalist design, going beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. They belong to a new generation, which has the courage to redefine and improve upon history using digital tools.

Design Becomes Normative
The twenty-first century began with some quickly aborted attempts to create a new futurist spirit with laboratory-style, sterile interiors, using only white, high-tech materials pictured in design and fashion magazines. These were reminiscent of the optimistic astro-futurism of the 1960s, as pioneered by designers such as André Courrège and the Dane Verner Panton. Around the year 2000, the tone was set by Martin Margiela, with his painted-white clothes and store designs, and Marcel Vanders, with his company Moooi. At the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan, almost all the floors were white, glossy and unsullied by human activity.

These futurist visions were abruptly interrupted by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, in which militant Arab factions razed the New York World Trade Center in a stand against Western dominance. In Sweden, the Scandinavian minimalist era of the 1990s came to an end with the government-appointed Year of Design in 2005. Before that, design had been exclusive and the editor-in-chief of Wallpaper magazine, Tyler Brûlé, had taken it upon himself to dictate the prevailing trends (among other things, appointing Stockholm as the trendy city of 1999). During the Year of Design, it was the prime minister and other representatives of the powers who took custody of the word ‘design’ and thereby stamped it as uninteresting and normative.

The attention of students at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and the HDK School of Design and Crafts shifted towards handicrafts and sustainability, and some started labelling themselves as craftsmen. There was talk of new leftist winds, but the only thing that happened was that the arts and crafts scene took over the role of the trendsetter. The path for this shift was laid by a heated debate around diversity as the loftiest of objectives.

Year of Design in Sweden 2005 vs. WDC Helsinki 2012
A comparison between Sweden’s Year of Design in 2005 and Helsinki’s World Design Capital status in 2012 may be vain from a Swedish perspective. It seems evident to me, however, that the Year of Design came either too late or too early. I believe it was partly conjured forth as a political concession by authorities who hoped for more collective efforts in design.

WDC Helsinki 2012, as I see it, comes at a time when a new attitude towards design has already matured. Some see design as nationalistic and therefore exclusive and elitist, but even that perspective seems antiquated now. It is a fact that there are nationalist movements in Nordic politics right now, and their existence at a high governmental level has brought questions of cultural heritage to the forefront for many people, even though they are often linked with racism and intolerance. I maintain that artisans and designers have been frontrunners in applying cultural heritage in a novel way, without letting it be tainted by intolerance. If anything, their way of relating to traditions has freed culture from possession by powers on the far right. Suddenly there are many of us who want to protect folk dancing and regional costumes, while ensuring that they have nothing to do with racism or similar tendencies, which would have it that some cultures are purer or better than others.

Steinunn Sigurðardóttir’s relationship with the very special Icelandic landscape and Harri Koskinen’s textiles are good examples of this. On the surface, they represent modernism and simplistic Nordic design, but their content is reflective and inspired by folk traditions.

Twenty-First Century Romanticism
Since 2005, the new century has been filled with ideas of reuse and sustainability. Large parts of the development of fashion, design and handicrafts have been characterised by historical references to similar movements in the late 1800s. Values have also shifted from objective good taste to the subjective and the individual. Interest is drawn towards uniqueness and diversity rather than mass production and industrial collaboration. Working with industry was, back in the 1960s, initially a democratic move for many designers, a revolt against providing one-of-a-kind beautiful items for the lucky few. The revolt of the twenty-first century is, instead, against a design market and design production that are seen as exclusive and elitist. Today’s one-of-a-kind objects are inclusive; there is no single correct way of doing things. Movements such as do it yourself and fashion exchanges stand for recycling and sustainability and imply that all the different folk cultures of the world are equally valuable. Many of them are now represented in every Swedish city.

Since 2000, Sweden has had five official minority languages: Finnish, meänkieli (Torne River dialects), Sami (several languages of the Sami people), Romany and Yiddish, which gives the concept of Excellent Swedish Design a whole new set of meanings. In 2010, Sweden’s conservative coalition gained a new vote of confidence from the people and a new party entered parliament with a non-foreigner-friendly agenda. The social democrats who had dominated Swedish politics for the entire second half of the 1900s faced their worst ever election results. Could that be seen as the end of the social democratic movement, a part of the great social experiment of the twentieth century? To what extent are fashion, design and crafts affected by politics? Ugly Cute, with a cross-section of modernism in their furniture and interior designs, probably come close to the answer. Their version of Bruno Mathsson’s best-known armchair, Eva, is one of my favourite items for illustrating today’s design when I take guided tours around the museum. Their version is an exact copy in terms of the shape (i.e. the function, in line with Mathsson’s philosophy), but the materials are cheap plastic strips in uncoordinated colour combinations placed over MDF, a cheap and raw recycled material. In an almost pedagogical way, they demonstrate that the twentieth-century forms created strictly based on function are actually nothing more than aesthetics – at least not for a twenty-first-century viewer.

Front
In the international arena, Swedish design is dominated by the design group Front. The group graduated from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 2004 as a female quartet. By the time they won the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize at the Röhsska Museum, they were a trio. The four founding members of Front were Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren and Katja Pettersson. They are excellent representatives of a time dependent on and characterised by the constantly developing tools of the Internet and digital intelligence. I consider their investigation of the relationships between 100 individuals and objects to be a revolutionary step in the history of twenty-first-century design. The research showed that the items to which participants were most attached were figurative and/or in some way defective. We often give a name to the objects of which we are fondest, and they might include a car with ignition problems or a porcelain deer with a missing ear. This was the inspiration for Front’s creation of a series of articles for the design company Moooi: the Horse Lamp, Rabbit Lamp and Pig Table.

Even in Swedish fashion, the dominant trends are now hand-crafting and sustainability, but they are redefined here as tailoring. The ‘New Look’ created by Christian Dior in 1947 became a role model and the exhibition ‘The Golden Age of Couture’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London came just at the right time, with its opening in September 2007. It seems that for a while, all Swedish distinctions in fashion and some in design were given to either Sandra Backlund or Helena Hörstedt, who were probably the most ground-breaking Swedish fashion designers of the early 2000s. With techniques such as pleating and knitting, they created sculptural forms that gave a whole new dimension to wearable fashion. They may have found their inspiration in avant-garde Japanese fashion designers such as Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, who in turn drew from the tradition of the Japanese kimono and its figure-concealing silhouette. This can be compared, for instance, to the burqa and its concealment of the woman’s body in the Islamic world. Perhaps they were looking even further back, to the Finnish designer Vuokko Nurmesniemi, who was more of a graphic sculptor than a tailor in creating fashion designs.

The winners of the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize in 2008 (Steinunn Sigurðardóttir from Iceland) and 2009 (Harri Koskinen from Finland) are interesting phenomena within the context of the new millennium’s revolution in design. They both refer to their local design histories. Sigurðardóttir moved back to Iceland after making her career in Europe and New York over several years. She takes her inspiration from Icelandic folk costumes and the country’s unique volcanic landscape.

Steinunn Sigurðardóttir
Steinunn is an important representative of the new fashion scene of the twenty-first century, where tailoring and haute couture again started taking over in Nordic fashion from the long-triumphant ideals of simplicity and mass production. What is new is that the resulting clothes are a combination of sculptural artwork and a high degree of usability. Function and comfort are the Nordic heritage, but they are now linked to international demands for quality and romanticising trends. Inspiration often comes from the local and folky. Steinunn’s designs have a clear natural romantic orientation. She gives as her sources of inspiration phenomena such as lava, magma and the various states of volcanic rock, which are embodied in her pieces in pleating, gathering and contrasts between matte black surfaces and glossy black with in-woven glitter.

Her headpieces are, to a great extent, reminiscent of the hat that is part of the Icelandic national dress for women. When Steinunn exhibited her collection at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, she gave a talk about her son, who has a motion disability. She spoke warmly and lovingly of how his attitude towards life made her reconsider the fashion industry in which she worked – an industry that often idealises a certain physical appearance with much too little room for any abnormalities. This provides a further dimension to the modern, locally inspired approach to a national cultural identity in her fashion designs.

Harri Koskinen
On the surface, Harri Koskinen may be seen to regurgitate some of the concepts of famous Finnish modernists such as Alvar Aalto or Kaj Franck, but what he does is update their functionalism with a modern aesthetic. For me, he creates new styles out of history. He has a romanticised relationship with Aalto and Franck, who were both important influences in the Finnish context in which Koskinen was brought up. One of Koskinen’s lamps is reminiscent of the type of TV that was probably found in his childhood home. Exhibiting his work at the Röhsska Museum in 2008, the placement of items was incredibly important to him; I should know, because I tried to move something one evening, and he moved it right back the next day. His TV lamp was placed in a corner in front of an armchair pointing at the ‘television’. Their placement in relation to one another imitated the setup of most TV rooms throughout the Western world in the late 1900s.

Harri Koskinen refines the Finnish tradition and raises it to new heights by updating its design idioms – reverently, perhaps, but still bringing it into the digital era. I see his version of the old streamlined minimalism as more confident and, above all, removed from all moralisation and insinuation. Koskinen’s style is more welcoming for a wider public, and perhaps less idealistic as to the ability of his contributions to change the world. Quite simply, he has more fun and adopts a humbler attitude towards his surroundings.

He makes use of the history of the twentieth century, or what is these days called vintage. Koskinen has the courage to improve upon his esteemed predecessors, thanks – as with so many others in his generation – to the fact that he has harnessed the power of digital technology.

Henrik Vibskov
Henrik Vibskov is a creator of the new Nordic identity that fits so well with the philosophies of the founders of the Röhsska Museum in the late nineteenth century. Vibskov was born in a rural setting, close to the birthplace of the Danish success story and its most famous export: bacon and eggs. He studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, following in the footsteps of many other ground-breaking, thought-provoking and revolutionary fashion designers, such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. His combination of such an international context with a highly local inspiration and creative process is what makes Vibskov so unique. All of Vibskov’s family come from the countryside to attend his spectacular fashion show performances. As an example, his brother, a bearded provincial vicar, participates in the fashion shows as an extra.

Vibskov’s graduation collection from Saint Martins utilised a gingham-like pattern of red-and-white pig faces, perhaps referencing the Danish flag. His ‘Pig Suit’ is preserved at the Designmuseum in Copenhagen. His answer as to why he choose pigs was: “There are more pigs in Denmark than people.